Review/Opera; Pavarotti and Vocalism Star in Met's 'Rigoletto'

By DONAL HENAHAN

Published: November 6, 1989

If there is such a thing as a singer's opera, ''Rigoletto'' qualifies. With its inexhaustible stream of familiar arias, duets and larger ensemble numbers, culminating in the famous quartet, it is the Verdi work most likely to attract the fancier of pure vocalism, the operagoer who votes only with the ear. Those single-issue fans had plenty of reason to cheer at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday evening, when a new production of ''Rigoletto'' paired Luciano Pavarotti with a newcomer to the company, June Anderson.

Fortunately, vocalism was not the only story. Both singers used their artistic sensibilities to create character and to summon emotion from music rubbed smooth by generations of mindless performers. In this, Mr. Pavarotti and Miss Anderson were aided by the respectful if conventional staging of Otto Schenk, which allowed the singers to do what singers do best rather than distracting them and the audience with directorial conceits. Zack Brown's sets and costumes, though similarly unremarkable, kept Verdi's ''Rigoletto'' in sight at all times. Marcello Panni's conducting, more consistently propulsive than alert to nuance, was idiomatic in that it generally paid more attention to the singers than to the orchestra.

Miss Anderson's debut as Gilda, though belated, could not have been more welcome. The Metropolitan is not rich in artists of this caliber. The tall soprano left America a decade ago to build a phenomenal European career, chiefly in the florid works of Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini. She demonstrated in a ''Caro nome'' of exquisite taste, effortless fluidity and pinpoint precision that she is a master of the bel canto style. She is comfortable above high C, but the lower ranges do not suffer in quality or power. The wide leaps of the ''Caro nome'' coda were taken effortlessly and squarely on the note. The Met audience does not often hear a trill as thrushlike and as precise as Miss Anderson's, nor a soprano who can soar as grandly over the ensemble in the quartet.

In these and other ways (mushy diction, for instance), Miss Anderson reminded one of the young Sutherland. It was a pleasure to hear such a full, fluid voice lavished on a role too often assigned to coloratura canaries who represent Gilda as a bird-brained innocent.

No role fits Mr. Pavarotti more snugly than that of the licentious Duke of Mantua. One grown inured to the crudities of style and tone that pass for vocal excellence nowadays heard his first few notes and settled back, happy to realize that the Italian tenor is not yet an extinct species.

Mr. Pavarotti's Duke, however, was more than a tenor; he was a complex character, reminding one that cruelty is often the other side of a sentimental nature - Hitler, you remember, sincerely loved his dog and Eva Braun. ''Questa o quella'' was not barked out like a declaration of sexual warfare but thrown off elegantly, with the air of a man who cultivates seduction as one of the fine arts. In ''Parmi veder le lagrime,'' Mr. Pavarotti's Duke revealed himself as a brute, but a sensitive brute.

In the title role, Leo Nucci made an honorable stab at a character that must be partly pitiable, if mostly repellent. His baritone measured up reasonably well to the challenge of ''Pari siamo,'' but he conveyed little of that monologue's subtleties. His face made up in deathly gray, he played too much of the time on one string, stressing the jester's monstrous nature when the greater challenge is to make one understand and sympathize with his criminal urges.

Lesser roles were managed capably or better. Sergei Koptchak's barrel-tone bass served him well in the role of Sparafucile, though his costume and demeanor reminded one more of Gounod's Mephisto than a back-alley hitman. Alan Held pronounced Monterone's curses balefully. The Maddalena, Birgitta Svenden, began weakly but let her dark mezzo blossom in the quartet.

This ''Rigoletto'' used, for the first time at the Met, Martin Chusid's new critical edition, which corrects many minor errors but differs in few important respects from the version with which Met audiences are familiar. THE CAST - RIGOLETTO, opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi, libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, after Victor Hugo's ''Le Roi S'Amuse''; conductor, Marcello Panni; production by Otto Schenk; sets and costumes by Zack Brown; lighting by Gil Wechsler. At the Metropolitan Opera. Gilda...June Anderson Duke of Mantua...Luciano Pavarotti Rigoletto...Leo Nucci Maddalena...Birgitta Svenden Monterone...Alan Held Sparafucile...Sergei Koptchak Giovanna...Sondra Kelly Countess Ceprano...Joyce Guyer Borsa...Richard Fracker Marullo...Vernon Hartman Count Ceprano...Richard Vernon Page...Constance Green Guard...Mitchell Sendrowitz